When offering a software service that allows for the downloading of content, it is important to service a customer base that includes both customers in their corporate environment as well as home users who are still using dial-up internet connections connected to the internet by internet accelerators. In many cases, corporate environments are protected by a proxy service. Some download managers may not work if internet protocol requests are not redirected. Furthermore, some internet accelerators fail to honor HTTP GET requests that ask for the content size causing the download manager to fail.
Corporate environments are becoming increasingly concerned with their employees using network bandwidth for content downloads that may hamper an information technology (IT) department's ability to deploy security fixes, hot fixes, and the like. IT departments depend on the WINDOWS® Background Intelligent Transfer System (BITS) developed by the MICROSOFT CORPORATION of Redmond, Washington to control software deployment activities. BITS is the mechanism by which the WINDOWS® Operating System, also developed by the MICROSOFT CORPORATION of Redmond, Washington, provides computer software updates to publish security patches, hot fixes, etc. BITS is not perfect and may not work in the presence of some proxy servers unless a client's internet settings are configured in a particular way.
With internet accelerators, a download program or download manager may not operate correctly because the information that is required to enable the download is not available. Internet accelerators are known to strip away data that is required by a download program, not for any purposeful intent but because the data is viewed by the computer software as being not necessary. The internet accelerator strips this data to speed up the internet transfer. For example, a download manager may need the content size of a file in order to determine how much information may be downloaded from the internet. Unfortunately, the internet accelerator strips away information providing the content size in the file because it is deemed non-critical to the acceleration process. Therefore, if a download manager cannot recognize the content size for a particular file, the download process may fail. From the perspective of an internet accelerator, the internet accelerator's job is to strip away non-essential information before providing information to the user. For the download manager, certain information is required in order to enable the download process to work and if that information is considered non-essential, then the download process will not work.